Indebted

We watched a grim little programme last night about a young mother of three who got herself and her husband into debt after they moved into a flat of their own. Like most couples in their situation they'd spent some money to have the place renovated, and decided they needed a nice television set and computer and stuff on top of what it already cost them. Also they employed a maid. None of this cost a fortune: you couldn't have accused them of spending wildly. But they'd gone beyond their means, despite both of them having a job. Obviously they were not earning all that much.

The young lady involved had turned to money-lenders to tide the family over. The amounts involved were not all that great, but when you're struggling a few hundred dollars starts to look like a lot of money and the debts, partly due to the excessive rates of interest involved, eventually ran into thousands. The stress got too much for her and she became suicidal.

Fortunately some kind of resolution had been worked out, due to the intervention of the girl's family, and the debts had been settled. It took a lot of courage for her to go public on her troubles, we both felt, especially in the context of the relatively small Malay community here - the programme being broadcast on the Malay language Suria channel. We guessed she'd been encouraged to speak out about her situation to help others by airing the issue.

A further reasonable guess to make is that there are an awful lot more like her, struggling, often in silence, with debts significant enough to make their lives thoroughly miserable, yet by no means having been outrageously extravagant. They just want what everybody else seems to have got before they can really afford it, in a world that tells them these are things that everyone should have.

I was brought up with an absolute horror of debt, I suppose because in the days of my childhood our family was never that far away from the possibility of slipping into it. It was taken for granted that going without was the way the world was ordered. That way of thinking seems to have been left behind in our brave new world of consumer credit, more's the pity, leaving many quiet victims, I suspect, to pity.